REP. Chel Diokno’s proposal to require every public official to submit, together with the statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN), a family tree covering relatives up to the fourth degree of consanguinity and affinity is being sold as a transparency tool in aid of an anti-dynasty law. At first blush, it sounds reasonable. Who could be against exposing political clans? But upon closer examination, the proposal reveals a fundamental confusion between regulating political power and mapping private kinship. The result is a measure that is legally fragile, administratively unworkable and constitutionally suspect.
The first problem is that the proposal treats kinship itself as a regulatory evil. A fourth-degree family tree does not merely cover parents, children or siblings. It extends to grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, cousins once removed and an equally expansive universe of in-laws. This is no longer disclosure. It is compulsory genealogy. Many of the individuals swept into this net will be private citizens with no political office, no intention of running and no access to state power. Yet they are forcibly pulled into a public registry simply because of blood or marriage. Transparency, in this case, becomes indistinguishable from intrusion.
From a constitutional perspective, this is where the proposal immediately falters. The right to privacy, while not textually explicit in the Constitution, has long been recognized by the Supreme Court as part of the liberty protected by the Bill of Rights. SALNs survive scrutiny because they are narrowly tailored to corruption prevention and focused on the public official. Diokno’s proposal departs radically from this logic by compelling disclosure not of the official’s own conduct or assets, but of the identities and relationships of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of private individuals. The state’s interest in curbing dynasties does not justify forcing nonpublic persons into involuntary exposure. Courts are likely to see this as a disproportionate and unnecessary invasion of informational privacy.
Equally troubling is the equal protection problem embedded in the proposal. While facially neutral, its effects are anything but. Officials from urban, mobile or nuclear-family backgrounds will have relatively modest disclosures. Officials from rural towns, Indigenous communities or long-settled provinces where kinship networks are naturally dense will face a vastly heavier burden. Two officials exercising identical power and behaving identically under the law will be treated very differently simply because of genealogy. That is not a rational classification tied to a legitimate governmental purpose. It is structural discrimination disguised as reform.
There is also a deeper issue of overbreadth and due process. Political dynasties, as a constitutional concern, refer to the concentration of elective power within families. They are about office-holding, succession and control, not about how far a bloodline extends. By capturing relatives with no political role whatsoever, the proposal sweeps far beyond the harm it purports to address. It converts status of being related, no matter how distant, into a regulatory trigger. Philippine jurisprudence has consistently been wary of laws that burden individuals not for what they do, but for who they are related to, absent a clear and direct nexus to wrongdoing.
The administrative consequences are equally sobering. In many barangay and municipalities, a fourth-degree family tree would resemble a voter’s list. Verification alone would be a nightmare. Who validates the accuracy of these trees? What happens to errors, omissions or honest ignorance of distant relations? Does a forgotten cousin of a spouse become a ground for liability? The proposal creates enforcement problems so severe that selective application becomes almost inevitable. And selective enforcement is the twin of arbitrariness, the very thing constitutional safeguards are meant to prevent.
Perhaps the most ironic effect of the proposal is that it risks undermining the very anti-dynasty cause it seeks to advance. By overreaching, it hands opponents an easy constitutional target. A measure that might have sparked a serious debate on regulating simultaneous or successive office-holding within immediate families instead shifts attention to privacy violations and legal excess. In doing so, it weakens, rather than strengthens, the case for reform.
There is also a chilling effect that cannot be ignored. The Constitution protects not only the right to privacy, but political participation. Burdening potential candidates with onerous disclosure requirements that expose their extended families to scrutiny and stigma may deter capable local leaders from entering public service, especially in close-knit communities. The unintended consequence is to narrow, rather than broaden, the pool of political participation, hardly a democratic outcome.
None of this is to deny that political dynasties are a legitimate policy concern. The Constitution itself directs Congress to prohibit them “as may be defined by law.” But that caveat matters. A constitutionally sound anti-dynasty law would focus on actual exercises of political power: simultaneous holding of elective posts, immediate familial succession and the use of incumbency to entrench control. It would limit coverage to close relations directly implicated in these practices. And crucially, it would regulate conduct, not compel the mass disclosure of private identities.
More troubling still is the false sense of precision the proposal creates. A neatly drawn family tree suggests control, coordination and conspiracy where none may exist. Kinship does not automatically translate into political command, vote delivery or policy capture. Philippine politics is messy, contingent and often transactional; alliances form and dissolve across families as much as within them. By elevating bloodlines into presumptive evidence, the state risks mistaking correlation for causation. This is not just bad law; it is bad political science. Anti-dynasty reform should be grounded in observable behavior in shared campaign machinery, synchronized candidacies, revolving succession not in surnames connected by dotted lines on a chart that obscure context, agency, accountability and democratic choice at the local level itself.
Good intentions do not cure bad design. Reform that ignores constitutional limits is not bold. It is careless. Diokno’s proposal confuses visibility with accountability and genealogy with governance. In trying to expose dynasties, it ends up exposing families. That is not transparency. It is overreach. And in a constitutional democracy, overreach, no matter how well-intentioned, rarely survives.
The author is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTV Network Inc. The views expressed here are his own.